After Ken Davis closed his take-out restaurant in Edina after owning it for a year, he physically took his homemade barbecue sauce on the road to local supermarkets to sell it. “There was more than one discouraging word” when Davis made his decision to market his sauce, recalls Barbara Davis. “We did receive lots of discouraging words. It was hard to market barbecue sauce. [Some] people said they don’t eat barbecue sauce – it’s like eating hot sauce to them and they weren’t interested.”

Her late husband’s bio on www.ken davis-bbq.com says that the discouragers included the Small Business Administration that “thought he was crazy,” and banks and financiers resisted his requests as well. Continue Reading →